What type of computer does the Pac Man & Namco plug and play joysticks use?

[rhindlethereddragon]

I own both the Namco and Pac Man/Ms. Pac Man "plug and play" joysticks, and I was wondering what type of computer powers these? These all seem to be the "real" arcade versions, so I'm assuming they are emulated, but on what?

[onmode-ky]

The Jakks Pacific Namco-series TV Games plug-n-play systems do not run via emulation. Very few plug-n-play systems do, since emulation requires the host hardware to be significantly faster than the emulated hardware. As far as Jakks Pacific goes, only the recent (came out a few months ago) Taito Space Invaders 10-game TV Game unit runs entirely through emulation (Jakks' Atari Paddles TV Game was quasi-emulation, and these two systems, though years apart, had similar development staff, Jeff Vavasour and his associates). Everything else is reprogrammed (i.e., ported) to run on the different hardware.

 

The first Namco TV Game system (5 games, headlined by Pac-Man) ran on a Winbond microcontroller, most likely a member of the W55V9x chip family--mind you, I don't have absolute, documented confirmation on this one, but I'm fairly certain. All the subsequent TV Games in the Namco series ran on Sunplus SPG2xx-family microcontrollers, the majority (possibly all) being SPG240. The SPG240 was a workhorse in plug-n-play gaming, with a large number of products, from Jakks and otherwise, being based on it.

 

More information of this sort, including a chart detailing which systems ran on which microcontrollers, is available at my website, which is in my AtariAge profile. The information is also in the first post of this forum topic, though it may be more difficult to read there.

 

onmode-ky

 

P.S. It's my 300th AtariAge post. My rate of posting continues to increase!